Louis Gallet - Citizendia

Louis Gallet

Louis Gallet (1835–1898) was an inexhaustible French writer of operatic librettos, plays, romances, memoirs, pamphlets, and innumerable articles, who is remembered above all for his adaptations of fiction—and Scripture— to provide librettos of cantatas and opera, notably by composers Ambroise Thomas (Mignon), Georges Bizet, Camille Saint-Saëns and Jules Massenet. A libretto is the text used in an extended Musical work such as an Opera, Operetta, Masque, sacred or secular Oratorio and A cantata (derived from the Italian word 'cantare' meaning 'to sing' is a vocal composition with an instrumental Accompaniment and often Opera is an art form in which Singers and Musicians perform a Dramatic work (called an opera which combines a text (called a Libretto (Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas ( Metz August 5, 1811 - Paris, February 12, 1896) was a French Opera Georges Bizet (25 October 1838 – 3 June 1875 was a French Composer and Pianist of the Romantic era Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (/ʃaʁl kamij sɛ̃sɑ̃s/ (9 October 1835 &ndash 16 December 1921 was a French Composer, Organist, conductor, and Jules (Émile Frédéric Massenet ( May 12, 1842 – August 13, 1912) was a French composer best known for his Operas

By day Gallet supported himself by a minor post in the Administration of Assistance to the Poor and positions, first as treasurer then as general administrator, at the Beaujon hospital, Paris, and other hospitals (ref. Saint-Saëns).

In 1871 Camille du Locle, the manager of the Paris Opéra-Comique offered to produce a one-act work of Camille Saint-Saëns. The théâtre national de l’Opéra-Comique ( National Opéra Comic Theatre) is an opera company and Opera house in Paris. He proposed as collaborator Louis Gallet, whom Saint-Saëns did not know, and the result was the slight piece La princesse jaune notable as the first japonerie on the operatic stage, Japan having only very recently been opened to Western trade and the first Japanese woodblock prints having been seen in Paris only two years previously. Japonism, or Japonisme, the original French term which is also used in English is a term for the influence of the arts of Japan on those of the The two worked together harmoniously for years, and it was Saint-Saëns who recommended Gallet as music critic for the Nouvelle Revue, though he was not a musician.

For Massenet he first provided a libretto for the oratorio Marie-Magdeleine (1872) which proved to be Massenet's first major success and the first of his four dramatic oratorios. An oratorio is a large Musical composition including an Orchestra, a Choir, and soloists The oratorio was somewhat modeled after the Opera

Georges Bizet's one-act opera Djamileh to Gallet's libretto premiered successfully, 22 May 1872 at the Opéra-Comique, Paris), but two other Bizet operas by Gallet and Edouard Blau remained incomplete at Bizet's untimely death in 1875: La coupe du roi de Thulé (1869) and a five-act Don Rodrigue (1873). The théâtre national de l’Opéra-Comique ( National Opéra Comic Theatre) is an opera company and Opera house in Paris. Édouard Blau (1836-1906 was a French Dramatist and Opera librettist.

In his libretto for Massenet's Thaïs he employed an unrhymed free verse that he termed, in Parnassien fashion, poésie melique which, like its classical Greek predecessors, was designed for a declamation with accompaniment (melodrama). Jules (Émile Frédéric Massenet ( May 12, 1842 – August 13, 1912) was a French composer best known for his Operas Thaïs original posterjpg|thumb|right|Original Poster for Premiere of Thaïs ]] Thaïs is an Opera in three acts by Jules Massenet to a French Parnassianism (or less commonly parnasism) was a literary style characteristic of certain French poetry during the positivist period of the 19th century Declamation (also known as Oratorical Declamation or Oratorical Interpretation commonly abbreviated to "dec" is a public speaking event of the National Catholic Forensic Melodrama refers to theatre in which music is used to increase the spectator's emotional response or to suggest character types In Gallet's hands declamation rose by degrees into a freely-structured aria that was raised above the level of prose by its sonorities and syntactical patterns, formulas that were finely suited to the musical techniques of both Saint-Saëns and Massenet. After Gallet's death, Saint-Saëns wrote

"I wish I knew what to say about the man himself, his unwearying goodness, his loyalty, his scrupulousness, his good humor, his originality, his continual common sense, and his intellect, alert to everything unusual and interesting. "

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